AngularJS, TypeScript, WebApi & Entity Framework Code Generation

Lately I’ve been building websites with AngularJS, TypeScript, WebApi and Entity Framework 6 (and Bootstrap, obvs!). A lot of the work is repetitive grunt-work, generating the model, then the DTO, then the WebApi controller, etc. For a little while now I’ve been using my own “code generator” tool to scaffold out these “templates”, which saves me a lot of work. Recently I open-sourced the project on GitHub, and now I’ve got a chance to blog about it.

I’ve also set up a hosted version, which you can play with now, to see how it works. Simply head over to http://codegenerator.sitedemo.co.za/ and log in with the following credentials:

Username: demo@capesean.co.za

Password: L3tM3!n

Here follows an explanation of how to use it, and what it does.

Projects

When you first log in, you will see a list of projects. Click the Demo Project for now. You will see a page like the following:

You can see there are 4 entities: Product, Customer, Order and Line Item (we all know where this is going, right?)

You’ll see 13 columns in the table: Model, Enums, DTO, SettingsDTO, etc. These are the outputs that will be generated by the tool. More on these later.

Entities

Clicking on the Customer entity link, takes us to the following webpage:

Some entity-level fields are hidden under that More > button, but we’ll ignore those fields for now. More importantly you see the 3 fields on the entity: CustomerId, Name, and Telephone. You can add more fields, rearrange the order, or click on a field row to edit that field.

Beneath the fields are the relationships with other entities: those relationships where the Customerentity is the parent, and then where it is the Child. Customer is a parent of Orders, so you can see the relationship to the Orders entity listed.

Beneath that you’ll find Code Replacements. Code Replacements allow you to customize the generated outputs. More on that in another post, though.

Fields

For now, let’s click the Name field. This brings up the following page:

Here you can see some standard things you’d need for a field: a field name, a label, the data type (e.g. nVarchar), the Length, whether it’s a key field, if it’s unique, if it’s nullable, whether it’s a search field, whether it should be shown on the search results page, a sort order, etc. So enough to get you started.

The Code!

Back on the entity page, if you click the blue Code </> button, you’ll get to this page:

Here you’ll find 13 checkboxes and 13 tabs: one for each of the output files that the Code Generator tool produces. (The checkboxes are for deploying the outputs directly to your local folder, if/when the tool is installed on your development machine – again, more on that in a later post).

The Model Code

For now, you’ll see that the tool is generating a Model file in the screenshot above. It’s outputting the key field, CustomerId, which is a Guid. The Name field is a 250-length string, with an index for uniqueness. There’s also a navigation property to the Orders collection, which is produced because of the relationship defined from Customers to Orders.

The WebApi Controller Code

Let’s look at the WebApi controller code next:

So the API is protected with Authorize(Roles = “Administrator”), and the route prefix is api/customers.

There is a Search end-point which takes an optional paging object, for paging through results, and then a string search parameter q. If this is supplied, the controller will search in the Customer.Namefield for any matches, because the Name field was defined as a text-search field. The name field was also designated as a sorting field, so the results are sorted by the Name. The controller then gets a paginated response object, and converts the model to the DTO using the ModelFactory.Createmethod.

Further down you’ll see a Get method, for returning a single item. Then an Insert and Update method, which both use a private Save method, and lastly a Delete method.

The AngularJS (TypeScript) Code

Ok, let’s look at what it does from the AngularJS / TypeScript side. Here is the output for the AngularJS controller, for the Edit page:

Ok, so this is a standard AngularJS controller, with several items injected. Let’s look at what it does.

There’s an initPage function which runs when the controller loads. It determines via the $stateParamsif the entity is being added (new) or loaded (existing). If it’s being loaded, it uses the customerResource (ngResource) to .get the appropriate record. That’s really it, in a nutshell.

Then there’s a save function, which saves changes up to the API.

Then there’s a delete function, which will delete the entity.

And lastly there’s a loadOrders function, which will load the customer’s orders, using the pagination parameters that were mentioned briefly in the Controller section above, so it will display 10 orders at a time with a pager to move through them.

The Html Code

Lastly, let’s look at an Html page that gets output.

Here’s the Html that works with the AngularJS controller. I’m not going to go into detail, but you’ll see it uses Bootstrap 4 (although there’s a setting for 3 on the Project), it does a bit of validation and uses ng-messages, has the Save and Delete buttons, and then displays the customer’s orders in a list at the bottom (if the customer record is not new).

Hopefully that explains it enough to show you what it can do. Obviously you’ll need to have a project with the appropriate supporting files (e.g. the BaseApiController.cs, the WebApiConfig.cs, the ApplicationDBContext.cs, etc). However, the CodeGenerator project on GitHub has all these files in it! So you can simply strip out the files related to the CodeGenerator, and paste in the files from your project, and you should be good to go. (If you’re struggling with getting that set up, I can/will provide an ’empty’ project that you can start with, if it would help.)

Let me know if you find it useful, and if you hit any issues. Hopefully this will help someone’s productivity as much as it’s helped mine!